From the dawn of Greek literature, then, Helen has been at the center of an extremely self-conscious debate that, like beauty itself, is about the tension between insides and outsides: How do we know when someone is telling the truth?

Helen’s way with words made her an irresistible subject for a number of later writers. The lyric poet Stesichorus (circa 630-555 B.C.E.) wrote a poem in which he criticized her wayward behavior. In revenge, it was said, she blinded him. Soon enough he wrote a retraction, or “Palinode,” in which he defends Helen’s honor, explaining that it was merely a phantom Helen who had run away with Paris, while the real Helen, faithful and innocent, was spirited away to Egypt. Duly placated, so the tale goes, she restored his sight.

The ease with which different sides of Helen’s case could be argued appealed to the so-called Sophists of the classical period, who prided themselves on their ability to “make the weaker argument appear the stronger.” The Sicilian philosopher and rhetorician Gorgias, born in 483 B.C.E., composed an exhibition speech in which he rattled off not one but four separate arguments in favor of Helen, each one of which could effectively absolve her of any blame for her actions.

Euripides, a contemporary of Gorgias, put Stesichorus’ tale of a phantom Helen to work in a tragicomic drama that bears her name, here again in order to explore the relationship between truth and fiction, rhetoric and reality. Helen’s dilemma bears an uncanny resemblance to that of many people who find themselves embroiled in heated exchanges on social media: How do you argue the truth when the whole world has swallowed a falsehood?

And yet, in the same playwright’s “Trojan Women,” Helen appears not as a hapless victim of false rhetoric but as a canny manipulator of it. In the presence of the grief-stricken Trojan wives and mothers who have been enslaved at the end of the war she herself had started, this Helen coolly exculpates herself with a series of gallingly disingenuous arguments. (She says we should lay the blame on Paris’ mother, Hecuba, since she gave birth to him in the first place.) In the play’s dark conclusion, her sophistries get her off scot-free.